American Airlines Pilots Seek 20% Pay Raise

American Airlines’14,600 pilots are seeking a 20.4% pay raise over three years, as well as improved scheduling because “they’ve been running my pilots ragged,” the pilot union’s recently elected president said Thursday.

“If it’s less than 20%, I don’t think our pilots would accept it,” said Ed Sicher, a Miami-based Boeing 737 captain who took office as president of the Allied Pilots Association in July. Sicher said he thinks the airline would accept the 20.4% number, but retroactive pay remains an issue.

The existing contract became amendable in January 2020. APA has proposed a contract with raises of 10% in the first year, 5% in the second, and 5% in the third, plus retroactive pay.

Sicher visited Charlotte on Thursday for a meeting of APA leaders. “In order to create schedule certainty and reliability in the fall and winter holiday schedules, management needs to get a tentative agreement in the next 30 to 60 days,” he said in an interview. “Right now, things are moving.”

Pilots are in high demand today. While the major airlines all say they have no problem hiring pilots, smaller airlines with lower pay say turnover is high. In June, American CEO Robert Isom offered a 17% pay raise. This disrupted negotiations at United, where pilots had been voting on a 14.5% pay raise. The 17% pay raise would have made American and United pilots even at the conclusion of the contracts, Sicher said.

The airlines “all keep looking at each other,” Sicher said. “Nobody wants to be first. If it’s too low you get a backlash. At United, the members said ‘hell no.’” He noted the rivalry between Isom and United CEO Scott Kirby, formerly president of American.

American pilots have not formally negotiated for pay raises since 1998, Sicher said. Salaries were cut 23% during the carrier’s 2003 bankruptcy: some items were restored in a contract that followed the 2013 merger with US Airways. Also, the carrier provided pay raises in 2017, equalizing pay with other carriers.

Currently at American, a 12-year narrowbody captain flying 80 hours a month earns a base salary of $267,700 annually, while a 12-year widebody captain flying 80 hours a month earns a base salary of $329,000 annually, APA said.

An American Airlines spokesperson said the carrier has “offered base pay increases of 16.9% through 2024, as well as increases to many other pay components such as per diem and training pay, and a 50% premium on all reassignments.” By the end of the agreement, American said, a top scale narrowbody captain would earn about $340,000 a year, while a top scale widebody captain would earn about $425,000 a year, plus additional retirement and profit-sharing pay.

Salary is not the only issue at American or elsewhere. The post-pandemic summer of 2022 — with its reduced capacity, stripped-down workforces at airlines and in air traffic control, overly exuberant scheduling and frequent thunderstorms in Charlotte, Dallas, Atlanta and the Northeast — has exposed the fragility in pilot scheduling.

While pay is the biggest issue for American’s nearly 3,000 widebody pilots, narrowbody pilots have been victimized by tight scheduling, Sicher said.

Among the issues, four- and five-day trips are common, and pilots have little flexibility to reschedule of their own volition, Sicher said. At the same time, the airline often reschedules, he said. “It’s chaos,” he said. “You don’t know where you are going,” especially on landing in Charlotte, where reassignments are common. “In Charlotte, it’s 50/50 I will leave with the same first officer I came with,” he said. “Its ‘musical first officers.’” If pilots turn down reassignments, they are not paid for trips, he said.

Another key issue is that APA wants to ensure that when American begins international service with the Airbus A320 XLR extra-long range narrowbody, narrowbody pilot pay is adjusted for international flying. Airbus has said the aircraft is scheduled for Federal Aviation Administration certification in 2023 and for commercial flight in 2024.

Sicher, 58, was born in Chicago. He joined American in 1998 after 12 years in the Air Force. He started as a Boeing 727 flight engineer, worked as a first officer on the Boeing 737 and 767 for 14 years, and has been a 737 captain for eight years. He was Miami domicile vice chair from 2015 to 2018 and chairman in 2021 and 2022. He said Miami flying, with some difficult landings at airports such as La Paz, Quito’s old airport and Tegucigalpa, poses unique challenges for pilots.

Asked what past APA leaders he most admires, Sicher cited Lloyd Hill and Dan Carey. “Lloyd was intransigent sometimes: he had a herculean task” as president following the bankruptcy filing, he said, while Carey “was fearless.”

Although elections for three-year terms were completed in July, APA is about to undertake a rerun of the election, after the union’s appeal board determined that some of the 14 candidates for office were improperly permitted to use the union’s email server to send campaign messages. Sicher was elected president by just 19 votes over Rob Baker, formerly Dallas domicile chairman.